Once Upon a Day (16 page)

Still, wasn’t it a little bit strange that all the press in the months after the awards focused on
his
next project? Not to mention how strange that project was.

For reasons that were never made clear (at least in any of the papers Janice read), Charles, having just won an award for a Western, had decided to turn away from them for good. He was casting for his new movie,
The View from Main Street USA,
described as “an ode to fifties family life.” The fifties? In 1979? Jesus, Janice thought, leave it to that guy to make an ode to a decade every normal person knew was as empty of real meaning as
The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet.
The fifties was the time of McCarthyism and
The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit
and miserable women stuck out in the suburbs with a passel of snot-nosed kids. And all those commercials for laundry detergents and floor wax and dust spray. The birth of TV soap operas.

At least Lucy didn’t have to clean, Janice thought. And the view from Malibu USA was nothing short of amazing, as she discovered when she picked up a local magazine and saw a feature on Eric Giles, the decorator who had done the Keenans’ house. The rooms were painted a muted yellow; the front French windows opened to a view of the ocean that seemed to stretch for miles, while the back looked out on the mountains and the most colorful garden Janice had ever seen. The furnishings themselves were magnificent—and the point of the article—but Janice was so caught up in the views that she didn’t pay much attention to the chairs and tables, lamps and rugs. She wondered what it would be like to wake up every morning and see such a lovely world. For a moment, she even considered
that Lucy might be really happy there, but then she noticed that Giles never mentioned even one thing Lucy said when he was talking about working with the Keenan family. “Mr. Keenan wanted the decor of the front room to harmonize with the flood of natural light.” “Mr. Keenan asked that the screening room wet bar be taken out and replaced with a play area for his son.” “Mr. Keenan said his wife’s dressing area should have an intimate feeling, and suggested a violet, rose and white color scheme since ‘Lucy loves violets.’” Eric Giles said he was “impressed” by the director’s “obvious feeling for his wife.”

Had Lucy’s tongue been removed? Did Charles have her locked in a closet somewhere (a tastefully decorated closet of course)? When she looked at those French windows, did she think of the view, or only of escape? And the most important question of all, put to Janice by Peter: why didn’t she just call Lucy and find out if she was okay?

“Because I don’t have her number,” Janice said irritably. “And it’s not like her people will just give it to me if I say I used to be her friend.”

“But can’t you leave a message for her to call you?”

“What’s the point? I still don’t like him. Nothing has changed.”

It all seemed to fit in a creepy way: Charles and his fabulous fifties family movie, Charles and his fabulous house. Lucy had nothing to do with either, Janice was sure. She told Peter if Keenan offered Lucy a part in his next movie, if he ever let Lucy be in anyone’s movie, she’d never say another bad word about the man.

Luckily, Peter didn’t hold her to that.

Not only did Charles let Lucy be in a movie, he also encouraged her to do so, according to an interview in
Variety.
The director was a friend of Charles’s, Derrick Mabe, and the role was perfect. Lucy would be playing a German violinist who saves dozens of her Jewish pupils from the Nazis. The title of the movie was
The Passion of Helena Lott.

“When Derrick sent us the script,” Charles told the interviewer,
“I read it immediately. I thought it was a brilliant exploration of maintaining personal morality in a time of national evil. I also thought my wife would be a natural for the title role because Lucy is such a principled person and an artist, like Helena.”

Dammit, Janice thought, why didn’t she do any interviews herself? Wasn’t this just a little bit strange for an actress whose career depended on getting herself in front of the public? And what the hell did he even mean when he said Lucy was a “principled person”? The Lucy who Janice knew had smoked an occasional joint and cursed and even tried to steal that spoon just because she liked it. Was he turning her into his clone?

In the last paragraph of the interview, Charles mentioned that Anthony Mills was “eager to work with Lucy again.” This time Anthony was playing Lucy’s lover rather than her torturer. Wow, thought Janice, what a hunk that guy is. She remembered when he asked Lucy to dinner when they were working together on
Horseman
. Charles knew about that, didn’t he? Would he really let his wife pretend to have sex with this guy, and in Germany, no less, because at least part of the film was supposedly being shot on location? And if he did, Peter asked, a little exasperatedly, because he really didn’t understand why Janice continued to be so hostile to Charles, would it change Janice’s opinion of him?

No, she said, frowning. She was training to be a social worker; she had to trust her instincts, and she just didn’t trust Charles Keenan. Never had, never would.

“I’m glad I made it past this infallible instinct radar of yours,” Peter said archly, but he smiled. “What if I hadn’t?”

“It’s completely different,” she said, but she smiled back. He’d just asked her to marry him on the flight home from visiting her parents in Milwaukee. Her parents had loved him too. Of course she’d said yes. She’d finally found her own luck.

She was planning the ceremony, looking for a good tailor to make alterations so she could wear her mother’s wedding dress, when she found out Lucy’s daughter was born. She hadn’t even
heard Lucy was pregnant, but then she saw the birth announcement in one of the local Beverly Hills papers. The filming of
Helena Lott
must have finished just in time, before Lucy started showing. Janice figured this out by counting backwards from May 7, 1980. She loved the name they gave the little girl. Dorothea Elizabeth Keenan. A tiny thing at just five pounds, but otherwise healthy.

The proud father was quoted in several articles giving his usual spiel about the importance of keeping his family’s private life private. No pictures again, not even those caught-on-Rodeo-Drive-type photos the tabloids thrived on.

Janice did send a present this time: an adorable little hat that she found at a funky thrift store on Venice Beach where she and Lucy used to shop. She shipped it in care of Charles’s office. But she didn’t put her name and phone number on the card. She was afraid Lucy would call again, but even more afraid she wouldn’t.

By the fall of 1981, Janice was married and in her senior year of college. She was distracted with her own life, but she still managed to note with some irritation that there were probably five times as many articles about Charles’s movie
The View from Main Street USA
as Lucy’s
The Passion of Helena Lott.
Apparently, the controversy that erupted over some remarks Charles made at the UCLA film school hadn’t hurt his movie at all:

“War of the Directors? Keenan Calls Lucas’s
American Graffiti
‘Shallow and Pointless.’”

Peter brought this article to Janice. When she saw that headline, she thought, oh boy, is Charles in hot water now! But then she read the piece and she couldn’t help but feel a grudging respect for him.

“‘It’s all technique, no depth,’ Charles Keenan told a group of film students. ‘Someone tell me: where is the meaning in this movie? That life is a style? That nostalgia is a substitute for a serious attempt to come to terms with the past?’ When asked by phone later if he was only talking about
American Graffiti
because his own movie about roughly the same period was set to debut next month, Keenan barked out, ‘Of course. If you’d done your homework, you
would know I was answering one of the student’s questions about whether I thought another movie about the late fifties and early sixties was necessary, given the success of
American Graffiti.
Because it was a student, I gave the question a fuller answer than it deserved. Obviously I think another movie is necessary. I made one.’”

Say what you will, Janice thought, the man has balls. He was not only making an enemy of George Lucas, but also of the hundreds of industry people who were his supporters, including his mentor, Francis Ford Coppola. But Keenan had never relied on the industry to make his movies work, and even though he was implicitly criticizing the reviewers and the public that had heartily embraced
American Graffiti,
they either didn’t know or didn’t care because they embraced
The View from Main Street USA
too. Nearly all the reviews were positive and Janice didn’t bother reading more than a handful. Lucy was the one she cared about. Charles was only interesting to her up to a point, and she was really getting sick of hearing how wonderful he was. Even Peter had to go on and on about the fabulous
View from Main Street:
how it redefined the period, giving stature to the fifties family, but not ignoring its flaws; how it brilliantly showed the commitment so many people made to giving their children a life they themselves had never even imagined.

The Passion of Helena Lott
had a more mixed reception. Most everyone seemed to love Lucy’s performance, but the film itself was criticized for being “slow,” “quiet,” “ponderous” and even “boring.” Janice wanted to blame Charles for this (wasn’t he the one who said the script was brilliant?), but as Peter ever so helpfully pointed out, a lot of the problem was the lighting (too dark), the soundtrack (too melancholy) and very few jump cuts, which made the story seem slower than it was. Janice told him he was becoming quite the amateur film critic, but then she decided she was glad he took it as a compliment.

For the rest of 1981 and a good part of 1982, there was a flurry of articles about what films Charles and Lucy would do next. They had more freedom than ever to pick their projects after the five
Academy Award nominations for
Main Street
(it only garnered one Oscar, this time for Best Original Screenplay, but that was Charles too, of course), and the nearly universal praise for Lucy in
Helena,
which every commentator agreed was amazing for a newcomer, even though she didn’t win any awards. Janice read all the articles she ran across, though she was wondering if she was finally losing interest, maybe even getting ready to stop this weird tracking of Lucy for good. She was out of college now, working as a social worker; Peter had just passed the bar and started his first job. The truth was the whole movie business had started to seem more than a little trivial.

But then Janice found an article that had an effect on her unlike anything else she’d ever read. It was just luck that she came upon this one because it was in a women’s magazine and she prided herself on never reading those. If she hadn’t been stuck in a long Labor Day line at the grocery store, she would never have opened the slick glossy, and she would never have known that Lucy Dobbins Keenan had finally given her own interview.

The article was billed as an “intimate chat” with the Academy Award–nominated actress, wife and mother, but the first few paragraphs were hardly what Janice would call intimate. All the questions were about the roles Lucy had played (Joan blah blah, Helena blah blah blah), and especially about the movie she had decided to do next: another war picture, this time about Vietnam, with Lucy playing a nurse on the battlefield who takes it upon herself to write letters to the girlfriends and wives and mothers of the men who die in her arms. Called
Tell Laura I Love Her,
it was being directed by one of Keenan’s former assistants. “My husband read the script first,” Lucy said. (Urgh.) “We both thought it was a beautiful story. It’s in preproduction right now, scouting for locations, getting the rest of the cast, hiring the crew. The shooting is set to begin in a few months and I’m eager to begin.”

The rest of the interview though really
was
about Lucy’s life. And it was three full pages—with pictures. Lucy sitting on the patio in
her gorgeous garden. Lucy standing in her gigantic kitchen, with pots on the stove and a spoon in her hand. Lucy in the playroom. Lucy only twenty-four years old and yet the mother of growing children.

The little boy, who they called Jimmy, was four now. The baby girl, Dorothea, was already two. He had Lucy’s red hair; hers was brown like Charles’s. They both had rosy cheeks and creamy skin and sprinkles of freckles, and Janice thought they were just about the cutest kids she’d ever seen.

In the best picture, Lucy was sitting on a big blue and white love seat in the playroom with the little girl on her lap, and the boy next to her, holding her arm. And there was no denying it any longer: Lucy was happy. She was still as skinny as ever, but the expression on her face was open and radiant and content in a way that Janice had never seen, not in either of her movies and definitely not when they used to live in Venice.

Didn’t this have to mean Charles wasn’t the ogre Janice had made him out to be? No, Janice thought stubbornly, there must be some other explanation. Maybe he’s not home very much. After all, he wasn’t in any of the pictures, now, was he? Or maybe he’s home, but always shut away in his enormous office—three leather couches and a mahogany desk the size of most people’s beds—that Janice remembered from the article about their decorator, Eric Giles. True, Lucy talked about how they shared the task of caring for the kids, how they didn’t even have a nanny because they wanted to be there for all the moments of Jimmy’s and Dorothea’s lives, but Lucy might say that even if she did do ninety percent of the work. Janice had lived with her; she knew Lucy could do all the shopping and cooking and dishes and cleaning and never let on that she thought there was anything unfair about it. Hell, Lucy could get up early on Sunday and walk blocks to get apple donuts she didn’t even like. She’d done it nearly every Sunday when she lived with Janice.